TV Culture

A lot of aspects of TV culture are quite different here... it takes some getting used to. In the UK, I was used to (and expected) short-run series (6 episodes) and mini dramas. Every week I looked through the TV magazine (TV and Satellite Week was our choice) to see what was new coming up that week. There was always something noteworthy starting (or occurring) on any given week. TV over here seems very different in the way series are structured. Here, there are very few network TV series starting or finishing on any given week. Most of the network TV schedules are taken up with long-running "safe" TV shows which have proven their worth (ratings) over the last few seasons. Nobody is taking any risks. This leads to a very stale, very consistent week-by-week TV schedule. One of the consequences is that for newcomers like us, it is difficult to engage with new TV shows... because there aren't many. The other consequence (for newcomers and long term Americans alike) is that the incumbent shows find it more and more difficult to retain viewers, because the shows naturally run out of plot (most TV shows obviously have a natural life in terms of plot development, and American TV seems to keep shows alive waaay beyond this). For example, Desperate Housewives would appear to now be embroiled in some kind of hostage situation. This is a show which is about housewives in American suburbia (the clue is in the name). It is not an action series. They are clearly running out of plot lines. Whoever is responsible for this show should have been focusing their energies on something new by now. We were lucky enough to arrive just as "Heroes" was starting on NBC. This is a fantastic series that you really should watch. It clearly has a single season plot (much like "24", I suppose), but it wouldn't surprise me if they manufactured something beyond that (much like "24", I suppose). Also "Hammered" that I previously blogged about I think would do enormously well on British TV (like Discovery Real Time). But other than those, there is little of the week-by-week diversity that I'm used to on BBC, ITV and channels 4 and 5. This is a real shame. Whatever happened here to create this situation, I really hope doesn't occur in the UK. Grrr...

Radio Gaga

Well, I admit that there is a certain inevitability to the frequency of blog entries dropping off. I think this is a natural consequence of us feeling more settled here, so I don't feel too guilty about it. What I do realise, though, is that anyone who is manually checking the blog for new entries will have probably become somewhat bored by now. Those people who are making use of the RSS feed (you know who you are) will now either feel slightly smug, or slightly patronised. So anyway... What do we miss? Well, I'm still feeling pretty nostalgic for the BBC. I've tried to find a radio station that makes me laugh like Chris Moyles did in the morning. Radio Alice is almost there with Sarah and No Name in the morning, but the main problem is that they're coming from a "Shock Jock" culture where being shouty and offensive is funny (and gets ratings). It's a real shame, because Sarah sounds like she's intelligent and hits some genuinely funny ironic/sarcastic/observation humor right on the button. No Name, on the other hand, seems to derive his humor from being loud and offensive. It's neither funny nor clever. On the up side, I've installed Alien BBC on our Squeezebox streaming music system in the house, which means we can listen to live BBC radio, and all of their archived recordings through our hi-fi. This makes things a lot more tolerable, and had Becky listening to Gardeners' Question Time earlier in the week. I still need a solution for listening to time-shifted Chris Moyles on my way to work, but I'm tempted to install Replay A/V which can schedule recordings of streaming media, so I can whack the mp3's on a CD and listen to them in the car on the way to work. Sirius Satellite Radio actually carries BBC Radio 1 (and hence Chris Moyles), but is only time-shifted by 5 hours (for the East Coast... and being a satellite radio system, there's not a lot they can do about that)... which is a shame. Missing Chris Moyles... who'd have thought it.